In Past Show

About Keltie Ferris

New York-based artist Keltie Ferris covers her mostly large-scale canvases with layers of spray paint and hand-painted geometric fields, creating the effect of brightly colored digital screens dissolving into pixels. “Paintings can seduce, they can shock, they can whisper,” she says. “I try to make the most direct and frank painting as possible, paintings that are so obviously being themselves.” While Ferris’s work frequently evokes references to Tron, The Matrix, and other sci-fi movies, the use of technology is mostly absent from her painterly, hands-on process. As The New Yorker once described: “Picture Monet’s garden as a graffiti-tagged plot in Bushwick and you get some sense of the grit, bravado, and beauty of these big abstract paintings made of oil, spray paint, and pastel.”

American, b. 1977, Louisville, KY, United States, based in Brooklyn, NY, United States